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Why you should move that button 3px to the left

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Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#131

Post by Wintamute »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #124
Wintamute wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've missed my point, and resorted to ad hominem. Way to go. I'm not saying that the little things aren't important, its great to be a perfectionist and I think sites are absolutely built out of details by designers and developers working in respectful partnership. But my point is that the design details that should be obsessed over come way before the traditional pixel pushing session at the end of the job. Things…

I did not call you immature, I called your comment immature. You made your point with an ad hominem on a whole profession of designers who care about pixel alignments, and so I seriously doubt you have significant experience working with designers. > But my point is that the design details that should be obsessed over come way before the traditional pixel pushing session at the end of the job. Things like consistent,…

Can a comment itself be immature? I'm pretty sure only a commenter has the agency to be immature, but anyway that's beside the point :)

> You made your point with an ad hominem on a whole profession of designers who care about pixel alignments

Nope, at no point did I ever criticise designers who care about pixel alignments. I criticised designers who place too much value on pixel pushing at the end of a project - for me it's often a red flag.

Admittedly where an approach involving "consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes" works best are for projects more towards the web app end of the spectrum, I will concede that point, but it doesn't mean the design has to be trivial.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#132

Post by kaishiro »

ryandrake wrote: post #92

Prove it. Measure it. Demonstrate with data that moving that button 3px to the left will increase sales by X% or customer retention by Y% or whatever our business metrics are. There's a difference between "obsessing over the details" and "tweaking for tweaking's sake". Make sure you're really doing the former and that the particular details you're obsessing over matter measurably.

Yes, thank you. Nailed it.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#133

Post by vikas5678 »

seivan wrote: post #34

This article pisses me off something immensely. How about you learn to fucking code your own design? 'Yet we’re at the mercy of our teams. We can design beautiful, intricate, delightful details — but we can’t build, test, and deploy them all.' No shit, so how about you stop being one of those lazy-ass photoshop goons who play fucking color-the-button on dribble all day long and actually learn to code your own fucking…

I disagree with this. I'm a web engineer and I work with designers. I dont have the ability to design pixel perfect interfaces and I respect that skill in someone who can. I also dont have the time to spend countless hours interacting with a product manager who trying to figure out a finished design.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#134

Post by tomelders »

grownseed wrote: post #76
seivan wrote: post #34

This article pisses me off something immensely. How about you learn to fucking code your own design? 'Yet we’re at the mercy of our teams. We can design beautiful, intricate, delightful details — but we can’t build, test, and deploy them all.' No shit, so how about you stop being one of those lazy-ass photoshop goons who play fucking color-the-button on dribble all day long and actually learn to code your own fucking…

Tone aside, I can't help but agree. My previous job (web shop) hired supposedly "rockstar" designers on several occasions, and the results were frustrating, time-consuming and in the end, largely worthless. What did not help was that those people had "print design" backgrounds, my bosses loved the rendered (hard) designs, and not having any design or development knowledge themselves, these sorts of ludicrous standard…

The age of the non developing designer is drawing to a close; Responsive design alone may be their undoing and good riddance I say, they've been designing to their mediums weaknesses for too long. So in awe are they of their own perceived brilliance that the strengths are a total mystery to them.

I cut my teeth as a print designer and the same old complaints were there then. The designer wants an 8 page gatefold as a single page can't possibly be expected to bear the weight of their genius. Nothing less than spot varnish and gold foil will do, costs and timeframe so be dammed. The main difference being, back then when something went to print that was the end of the deign process. The web has made designers greedy and lazy. I honestly can not remember the last time I was handed a finished psd. Designer like to state as fact that they can't be expected to finish a design without first seeing a half baked idea of something built for their amusement first. To this I say: if Einstein can postulate the theory of relativity by imagining himself atop a photon travelling away from a star at the speed of light, then it's not unreasonable for a designer to imagine what the site will "feel like" with parallax scrolling.

I love design, and rather than whinge and moan about how everyone else didn't care, I learnt code. Articles like the one linked to here reak of self entitlement and laziness.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#135

Post by zachrose »

grownseed wrote: post #76
seivan wrote: post #34

This article pisses me off something immensely. How about you learn to fucking code your own design? 'Yet we’re at the mercy of our teams. We can design beautiful, intricate, delightful details — but we can’t build, test, and deploy them all.' No shit, so how about you stop being one of those lazy-ass photoshop goons who play fucking color-the-button on dribble all day long and actually learn to code your own fucking…

Tone aside, I can't help but agree. My previous job (web shop) hired supposedly "rockstar" designers on several occasions, and the results were frustrating, time-consuming and in the end, largely worthless. What did not help was that those people had "print design" backgrounds, my bosses loved the rendered (hard) designs, and not having any design or development knowledge themselves, these sorts of ludicrous standard…

> This is 2014 and I don't think there's a place for single-skill design queens any longer.

I know what you're saying. But it reminds me that I would have loved to make a website with Jan Tschichold, Paul Rand, or so many other graphic designers who never even knew the web. (I'm sure they would also be interested in learning the details of the medium, even if they didn't want to code for it.)

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#136

Post by djyaz1200 »

Great article! Like many of you I have worked with great teams and bad teams. In my experience a great UI/UX is a sign of a great team/company with a clear focus. The designers and engineers cannot fight for whose approach is superior, they must respect and understand each other and the user intent. They have to communicate well and sometimes invent new options together when their views or constraints are in conflict. This requires talent, teamwork and a focus on excellence at a level that cannot be faked.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#137

Post by m3mnoch »

sxp wrote: post #77
Chris_Newton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since neither of them are able to actually justify their reasons beyond some vapid and subjective claim of making the product "more delightful" Do you appreciate the irony that you just wrote a whole post about making decisions objectively, in which you have essentially dismissed designers as ignorants who just make arbitrary decisions according to their personal whimsy, based on a series of unsubstantiated claim…

Why would you think a designer would have no justification for a change beyond “it looks nice”? What would you assume designers don’t understand issues like pixel alignment or designing for multiple devices? Why would you think designers would be raising these issues based on Photoshop mock-ups? Experience. I've had arbitrary requests made based on Photoshop mocks. I've pushed back against them after showing that the…

heh. methinks a programmer who thinks programming is objective and not subjective has the equivalent professional experience in the field as a designer who doesn't know the difference between design and art so designs subjectively.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#138

Post by MaulingMonkey »

Wintamute wrote: post #131
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not call you immature, I called your comment immature. You made your point with an ad hominem on a whole profession of designers who care about pixel alignments, and so I seriously doubt you have significant experience working with designers. > But my point is that the design details that should be obsessed over come way before the traditional pixel pushing session at the end of the job. Things like consistent,…

Can a comment itself be immature? I'm pretty sure only a commenter has the agency to be immature, but anyway that's beside the point :) > You made your point with an ad hominem on a whole profession of designers who care about pixel alignments Nope, at no point did I ever criticise designers who care about pixel alignments. I criticised designers who place too much value on pixel pushing at the end of a project - for…

> Can a comment itself be immature?

Yes.

> I'm pretty sure only a commenter has the agency to be immature

The commentator has agency, but by their human nature are complex enough that their individual actions - be they mature, immature, or whatever else - are rarely adequate to judge the commentator as a whole.

The most mature among us still has agency to make immature comments. The most immature among us still has agency to make mature comments. Labeling the act is not labeling the actor.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#139

Post by flibertgibit »

Great post. I noticed I read very little about usability and only about design. I'm assuming that the OP, Braden, assumes that we understand that usability is integral to design. The reason I say this is that I've heard and seen designers spend lots of time on something that most of the techs/devs said WTF to after they were done- one carousel, crappy menu, and pointless site after the next. That was an in-house design team working for a large university, btw, so the main problem was that the administration was the customer, not the primary users, which were students, university employees, prospective students, and parents of prospective students. And their attempt at usability studies involved a small number of students passing in the student union that got snickers bars in exchange for telling them what they thought. And no AB testing ever done.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#140

Post by dredmorbius »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #106
dubcanada wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the really really harsh and overly rude tone. I wonder what the difference would be if this was posted on a designer version of hackernews. The problem with your comment is you assume everyone can dabble in everything. When you work at a big co you are hired generally to do one thing, and that's it. Designers don't touch code. Developers don't touch designs. So while Sue may be able to do CSS, JS, Cocoa but…

Designers often don't even have time to touch code, even if they could. When your organization has more trouble hiring designers than devs, you need your designers doing design 120% of the time.

If you're utilizing your designers 120% time, you've got a business problem and aren't paying enough.
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